


In a Small Town

by SegaBarrett



Category: Angel: the Series
Genre: Bed and Breakfasts, Canon deviation, Gen, Small Towns, Traveling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-02
Updated: 2014-07-02
Packaged: 2018-02-07 03:01:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,270
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1882644
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SegaBarrett/pseuds/SegaBarrett
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Wesley, Faith, and Gunn run into each other in a small town that has a bigger problem...</p>
            </blockquote>





	In a Small Town

**Author's Note:**

  * For [tielan](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tielan/gifts).



> Disclaimer: I don't own Angel, and I make no money from this.

“I’m being followed by a rabbit.”

Wesley raised an eyebrow and looked at his former Slayer, the inscrutable Faith.

“What exactly does that mean? Is that some new slang term with which I am not altogether familiar?”

Faith shook her head.

“No. I mean literally.” She pointed downward to where a little brown bundle of fluff was hopping along, mirroring each and every one of Faith’s steps with precision. “This guy has kept up with me for the past three miles. I’m trying to figure it out. Maybe he’s an evil alien, or some kind of… demon-bunny thing. I’m sure Anya would have a theory.”

“Or it could just be a rabbit, Faith,” Wesley replied dryly. He figured that she must have been climbing the walls during her time in prison and hadn’t yet stopped after defeating the First Evil. He couldn’t blame her – from what he had heard it had been big, nasty, and particularly cruel-minded.

He almost wished that he had Jasmine back. At least she had made people feel wanted, which was better than driving them to kill themselves.

At least, he figured it was.

He had left after Angel had accepted Wolfram and Hart’s offer. After the horrible things he had done – chief among them being the fact that he had kidnapped Angel’s son and inadvertently given him to Angel’s worst enemy – this was the straw that broke the camel’s back. He could not join this legion of horror no matter what Angel had said. The look on Lilah’s face – that lost, haunted look – had cemented it for him. Had he loved the woman? He didn’t know if he could call it that or even what he could call it, but she had saved him this last time. She had saved him from making this last mistake.

“Rabbits aside, Faith,” Wesley started, “Where exactly are we headed?”

“We’re headed where the evil is,” she replied, “With so many slayers out and about, I guess we’ve got to find somewhere that doesn’t have one yet.”

“There isn’t exactly a directory.”

“Yeah, well… Somehow I get the feeling that you can tell. The nasties tend to show themselves pretty quickly to newcomers. They want to gobble up fresh fish…. Sometimes literally.”

They kept walking; neither one spoke for quite some time. The sun was beating down on them, and it made Wesley think of Angel and how he no doubt would still be inside or even sleeping now. It was funny how things changed.

“Somehow, Faith, I might have trouble for mistaking you as naïve.”

Faith shrugged.

“I might not have gone to high school, but I think I’ve pulled off some pretty good lessons in drama in my time.”

***

They arrived in a small town, north of Los Angeles, known as Braxton. 

“Can we stop and rest somewhere?” Wesley’s legs were about ready to give out if he tried to walk a few feet further. This didn’t seem like the hotbed of demon activity, however – at least not yet.

“How about here?” Faith inquired. “I mean, here is as good as anywhere.”

“Any particularly reason why this town?”

“Because this was where you asked?” Faith’s voice went up with her frustration. “Why are you asking? I thought you were the one who wanted to stop.”

“Yes, but… why this particular one?”

Faith glared at him.

“Oh, I get it. You’re back to playing Watcher/Psychologist. Well, Wesley, it didn’t work the first hundred times you tried it and it’s not going to work now. You wanna hear some kinda sob story? You’re out of luck.”

“I don’t want to hear a sob story, Faith.”

Yet Wesley was no more forthcoming with what he did expect to hear. Instead, he let a relatively comfortable silence hang between them.

For a man that she’d once tied to a chair and tortured, Wesley was still a mystery to Faith.

***

“Your room is on the far right, at the end of the hall,” Shelly, the hostess of the predictably titled Shelly’s Bed and Breakfast, explained. 

“You try anything and I’ll eat your brains for breakfast,” Faith muttered, not because she expected Wesley to actually try anything, but because it seemed like something she was expected to say. When she thought about it, it was a pretty lame threat, and hardly practical.

Faith felt like her hands were shaking, but when she looked down at them, they were perfectly still. She breathed out. The run in with the First had been a little much, even for her; she would have rather gone back to prison and dealt with those crazy girls who were always trying to fight her than deal with evil of that caliber again. It hadn’t been his (was it a he? Did something like the First have something like gender, or was it like air, just omnipresent and always there even after it died) power, but the way he could get inside their heads…

It had given Faith an uncomfortably close look at her own head. It must have been like what Spike had been going on about; having someone root around in there and implant things. For Spike it had been a chip, one that had made him act a certain way, made him seem docile or at the least, well-behaved. For Faith… well, she wasn’t sure what those little dots someone had poked in the gray matter meant, not yet.

“So what is a Bed and Breakfast exactly?” Faith ventured once they got inside the room and settled down on their separate beds. Almost all of the places Faith had stayed in were dives, with plenty of mice and the everpresent idea that someone had probably O.D.ed in there shortly before she had checked in.

“It’s exactly what it sounds like, Faith. They give you a bed,” Wesley tapped the mattress beneath him as he gingerly reached down to remove his boots, “And they also supply you with a morning meal. That being the breakfast part of it.”

“Where’s the TV?” Faith asked. She felt as if she had trespassed into someone’s private house and was going to walk downstairs and get licked to death by a golden retriever. It was an unnerving kind of feeling.

“You generally watch TV downstairs. It’s a sort of communal experience, I gather.”

“Fuck communal experience. I’m antisocial. Why did we book this place anyway?”

“Faith, try as I may to continue to explain to you… you are indeed trying my patience substantially. You were the one who wanted to stay in this town. It must only have a few hundred people; I doubt there is a Hilton nearby.”

“All right. Well. This breakfast better be fucking good.”

***

They woke early the next morning, with Faith determined to be on time for her promised breakfast. Downstairs was an elongated table that would allow for seating of about eight to ten people. There were a few couples settled in at one edge of the table, and closer to theirs was…

“Gunn!” Wesley exclaimed, his jaw dropping slightly. “What are you doing here?”

Charles Gunn looked up with a nod.

“English,” he stated. “What brings you here? I thought you left to go seek your own destiny, or whatever words you were usin’.”

“I did,” Wesley replied. “I’m more curious about what brings you here.”

“I heard some crazy shit has been going down in this town. And let’s face it, this is the only place to stay around here. That and Shelly isn’t hard on the eyes.”

Faith rolled her eyes.

“Thanks for reminding me that men only think with their dicks,” she muttered. “Can we please get off Shelly’s ass and talk about what reason, out of all the gin joints, that we walked into this one?”

“There must be something that ain’t quite right, if you catch my drift,” Gunn stated. “We tend to have a sixth sense for this kind of stuff.”

“Meet up in our room and we can figure this all out,” Wesley told him.

“Hold your damn horses,” Faith told him. “I’m not finished my bagel.”

***

They sat in Wesley and Faith’s room, newspaper clippings laid out in front of them. They told a dark story – in the past month, there had been seventeen people who had gone missing from within the town limits, when there’d only been one or two a year previously – and those one or two had mostly been runaways who had come back after having made their point.

“I wonder if some of these are runaways too,” Faith said, giving Gunn a meaningful look. “Throwaway kids.”

They’d both been those once upon a time, before they’d become warriors.

“Probably,” Gunn agreed. “No one around to miss them. But where do we start, then? I mean, we can’t really talk to their families. Who in here seems to have someone who would talk to us?”

“There might not be anyone who wants to,” Faith suggested. “Small town. They probably don’t want anyone poking their nose around, whether they want to help or not.”

“I have an idea,” Wesley spoke up. He turned his gaze in the direction of their hostess, Shelly.

***

“It’s so scary, isn’t it?” Shelly said to them, putting her hand over her mouth. “I think they’re trying to keep it quiet. The mayor and everyone. They don’t want to scare people away, and God knows, neither do I. I need the business. But still… I mean… It’s freaky, isn’t it? This many people missing.” She looked back and forth amongst the three of them. “Is that why you’re here? Are you reporters or something?”

“Not reporters. More like… private investigators,” Wesley explained. That was somewhat the truth, after all – they’d been private investigators once upon a time before everything had become so very complicated. That had been back in the days when they had been concerned about helping the helpless. Now Angel was caught up in Wolfram and Hart, and Wesley didn’t know if he would ever be the man he once was.  
It was as if he was dead, and they were simply trying to work in his memory. 

“Well, if you can find those people…” Shelly began, but she still sounded suspicious.

“That’s what we want to do, Shelly.” Wesley looked into her eyes, and it must have been something in that look, that searching look, that made her tell him.

“This is going to sound crazy… but some of the kids… they say there’s some kind of wild dog around here, who lives with a man. Who comes out… they both come out and creep around the houses at night. They’ve said it’s like they’re hunting something. Searching for something to… to eat, I guess.”

Faith stared at her.

“Sounds pretty fuckin’ creepy,” she said.

“Sounds about right,” Gunn agreed. “We need to go out and stop this thing.”

“Wait!” Shelly exclaimed. “I thought you said you were private investigators.” Her eyes narrowed with suspicion. “That doesn’t sound much like investigating. It sounds like going out and getting yourself into trouble.”

Gunn beamed at her, his eyes lighting up as he grinned cheekily.

“Ma’am, we’re only amateur detectives, but I assure you that we’re experts at getting ourselves into trouble. Where did the last person who saw this wild dog say that they saw it?”

***

“This is probably a bad idea,” Wesley spoke up, leaving the Without Angel hanging in the air. 

“Shut up,” Faith muttered. “This dog is going to come looking for a bone, and it’s going to get one.”

Wesley turned to Faith and rolled his eyes.

“Your expressions have gotten less colorful since you got out of prison,” he commented dryly.

“Used them all up on my adoring fans.”

“Both of you,” Gunn cut in, “Quit it.” He looked through the scope of the rifle for something, anything that was out of place. He worried that maybe after all this time, he had lost the touch. “You’re acting like two little kids. We need to focus.”

There wasn’t any dog magnified in the scope, but there was a man. A man wearing a dark cloak, one that flowed back and forth every time he walked, every time he paced. He had a way of seeming eerily familiar, though none of them could have said where they might have seen him before. What they did all share was the shiver that raced down each spine.

There was something evil in the air.

Wesley jerked up, staring straight ahead as he heard a low growl.

Where was the dog that Shelly had described?

They all stared forward as the man fell on to the ground and started to shake, as if he were having some kind of seizure. Yet, he wasn’t – at least, that didn’t seem to be the case; they had all learned now to look for supernatural causes as opposed to medical ones whenever possible.

The growl was not coming from the wild dog, but from the man.

None of them really were that surprised. At least they didn’t try to be; the shared feeling was something more like being doused with refreshing water after a particularly hot day.

“What kills this thing?” Gunn inquired, a little too loudly. “A silver bullet?”

“I don’t think he’s a werewolf,” Wesley countered. “I think he’s something new. We should retreat and research.”

“No,” Faith cut in, “We should kill it.”

“I agree with that,” Gunn chimed, “We should kill it dead.”

They exchanged another look. They disagreed, as they always would, but unspoken was agreement about the most important thing: they were home.


End file.
